My friend Mitch and I were playing the demo to Mirror’s Edge. I had played through the entirety of the demo, so then it was his turn. While frantically attempting to run away from some goons with guns, he sprinted towards a set of doors.

“Which one do I go through!?” he asked quickly.

“The red one! Go through the red one!” I responded.

He then ran to the grayish-white door next to the red one and was stopped in his escape attempt. The door refused to budge, the goons caught up to him, and they killed him on the spot.

Another time we were playing Red Dead Redemption. While watching my friend traverse the old West, I felt like the GPS of a lost navigator as I constantly had to tell him that he missed his turn on the mini-map, despite the curved red line that was meant to show him directly where to go.

I also watched helplessly as he ran into a building filled with outlaws that he thought was empty, even though there were red dots all over the supposedly helpful mini-map.

Color blindness occurs when there is an issue with the color-sensing granules in certain cell nerves in the retina of the eye. All it takes is just one of these granules to be missing to cause trouble differentiating between certain colors.

“I don’t think it impacts [gaming] too much when you’re playing games where the colors aren’t that important,” color blind gamer Sam Lane said. “But it really shines through when I play games like Madden when I have a similar colored jersey to another team. It’s not like I’ll throw to the wrong player, but I’ll look for a split second and think that it’s my player and look a little bit closer for another second and notice that it’s not.”

With so many people playing games and so many games using colors to signify both important and non-important aspects of games, what can games companies do to make the experience similar for everyone?

The most important items in Mirror’s Edge are a vivid shade of red.

One thing that some developers have been doing is putting settings specifically for color blind gamers into their games.

Johnny Richardson, Director of Industry Outreach for AbleGamers, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for and serves gamers with disabilities, says that putting color blind settings in games is so easy to incorporate into games that all developers should be able to do it.

“It’s one of the challenges that I think is easiest to address,” he said. “You can either design your game to not rely so much on color, or you can add options that add things like audio cues and the ability to change colors on certain things that make it much easier for your whole audience.”

Despite 10% of a game’s audience being color blind, putting settings into a game to make it easier on those who are color impaired doesn’t seem to be a priority for some developers. Richardson pointed out how Starcraft II doesn’t have any color blind settings even though the game’s lead producer, Chris Sigaty, is himself color blind.

In an interview with AbleGamers, Sigaty said that adding color blind settings into the game is something he would like to do, but is not high on the priority list.

The AbleGamers Foundation hopes to continue to change how developers approach making games with gamers with disabilities in mind. Richardson reaches out to primarily developers and talks to them about finding ways to improve the accessibility of their games for disabled gamers.

Richardson is also a game and web software developer and says things are getting slowly better, especially in regards to color blindness. He says color blind settings are one of the easier things to sell to developers because it would only take a few hours of work out of a game’s multi-year development period.

“There’s ways to adjust the shades of the colors to make it easier,” he said. “It’s just having sliders in the options menu where you’re actually able to change the hue of a color. That would solve the problem for a majority of people.”

Some developers are beginning to change their ways and incorporate these settings. Mirrors Edge, developed by D.I.C.E., did not have any color blind settings. Battlefield 3, also partly developed by D.I.C.E., received a patch in early June that added color blind settings on console versions of the game.

But there is another problem facing not only color blind gamers, but all games with disabilities. Information on which games have settings or options to accommodate them can sometimes be hard to find. Most gaming publications or websites don’t offer this kind of information up front. AbleGamers, however, is also helping with this difficulty.

The Foundation’s website has been reviewing games based solely on how accommodating they are to gamers with disabilities for years. The main categories presented are whether or not games need precision to play, if one-handed gamers will be able to play without difficulty, if there are subtitles for deaf gamers, and whether or not there are settings or audio cues for color blind gamers.

For example, Mirror’s Edge received a 2.5 from AbleGamers for only accommodating to deaf gamers by having subtitles of character speech, but not ambient sound.

Only 17 of the 91 reviewed Xbox 360 games have received a score of 8 or above, and only 2, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, have received perfect 10’s.

As a sign of change, games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic both had color blind settings when they first released. The games landscape is changing slowly in regards to accessibility, but the change that is happening is definitely a positive one for gamers of all abilities.

“It’s not as much of an uphill battle as it once was,” he said. “I think that just as gamers become more diverse, it’s becoming something that is just kind of assumed should be in a game.”

With the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops II today, the umpteenth different modern/futuristic first person shooter has been given to the masses. Quite obviously, the current video game market is filled with generic modern or near future shooters. It sucks.

You know what wouldn’t suck? If today’s developers made a World War II shooter again.

Call of Duty: World at War came out FIVE YEARS AGO. Since that time, the only other WWII based shooter of note was Sniper Elite V2 from earlier this year.

The very first Medal of Honor game was released way back in 1999. Sequels were spat out every year from 2002-2007. That’s eight years of WWII games.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out in 2007 and forever changed the shape of the video game landscape with its realism and story. Five years later we have Black Ops 2. The modern shooter age hasn't been quite as long, but the time to return to WWII is now.

One of the first shooters I ever played was Medal of Honor: Rising Sun for Gamecube in 2003. No other shooter has since been able to match the feeling I got from that game. Looking back, it wasn’t the best shooter (IGN gave it a 7.5 out of 10), but the game was a whole lot of fun.

I trudged through the campaign of Battlefield 3 and sat in spectacle of whatever the hell was going on in the story of the first Black Ops. Neither of these games, nor any other modern shooter, can match the realness that comes with WWII shooters.

The enemies in these games were real enemies of American forces, not the Russians, the Russians, or even the Russians. The things we fought for in WWII are well known by pretty much anyone who played the games. I couldn’t tell you what the hell I was fighting for in Battlefield 3 or Black Ops.

Modern shooters put in the boots of America and let you kick ass the American way! The WWII shooters didn’t really do that. I have never felt so utterly hopeless and scared in a shooter as when I played through the Omaha Beach mission in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault or the Pearl Harbor mission in Rising Sun.

You weren’t going into this distant country blowing the crap out of everyone you saw. You’re the underdog who’s running through enemy fire and watching allies die left and right.

These games gave you something real to fight for, not a group of badass soldiers with beards going to kill this year’s new terrorist bad guy.

Hell, I would even want to play one of these older games with a fresh coat of paint. These were damn good experiences of real events. It feels like today’s shooters have two attitudes when making games: Make the craziest scenarios possible, or play it safe.

Both options suck. Now imagine if Treyarch made a WWII shooter with different endings and outcomes of battles. Imagine if you actually COULD lose WWII. I don’t know any greater stakes.

Imagine what it would be like if today’s developers took the technology they have and the lessons learned (or not learned) from the past few years of modern shooters, and what they could create in the World War II scenario. Imagine how utterly REAL storming Omaha beach would be.

I’m tired of the same old stuff. Give us something real. Give us a real enemy and make us feel those real stakes. Give us a new World War II game.

I do not partake in alcoholic beverages. I never have and I never will. It’s nothing I make a big deal out of, it’s just something I don’t want to do.

My choice not to drink has never really had any implications in my video game playing, but one small moment in Mass Effect 2 really took me out of the gameplay experience.

The great thing about the Mass Effect series is that you can create yourself and have relationships with characters in the game just the way you want to. I prefer to try to replicate myself in the game as best I can.

In one side mission, I was tasked with finding a bottle of wine for the doctor on the ship, Dr. Chakwas. I found one and gave it to her. She then asked if I would like to drink some with her and have a chat.

You come here often?

I respectfully declined Dr. Chakwas’ offer, but then she wouldn’t talk to me. Every time I tried talking to her, she always asked if I wanted to drink with her. The only way to talk to one of my good friends on the ship would be to drink the wine, something I wouldn’t do.

Going to the University of Iowa, the number two party school in the nation, I’ve had to turn down my fair share of drink offers. Unlike every movie or television show about college life ever, it’s never a big deal. Most people are very accepting and most just don’t care.

There are a couple of people who ask why I don’t drink. The best explanation I can give for my reasons for not wanting to drink is mostly because of my parents. They aren’t alcoholics by any means, but growing up they spent a lot of their time at the local bar. It was more for socializing than for drinking, but it still was something that separated us.

Going back to the mission with Dr. Chakwas, that bottle of wine separated us growing together. She wasn’t one of the main side characters, but she was still someone I enjoyed talking to. It sucked. I literally could not further our friendship unless I drank with her.

Oh you wont be friends with me unless I drink with you? Ugh... fine...

So I had a couple glasses of wine. We talked. I passed the mission. Nothing ever came of it, but it still bothered me for some reason. I was upset that the game wouldn’t let me go further just because I don’t drink. It was something that felt really unfair.

It’s one minor section in a small side mission and I’m sure Bioware has much bigger issues to worry about, but it just sucks that they assumed everyone drinks and gave no alternative. I’m proof that you don’t need to drink to have friends. Bioware created a wall that doesn’t actually exist.

In Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the game begins with you already dead. In fact, Amalur opens with two gnomes making small talk over your fresh corpse. The two morticians dump you into a well called the Well of Souls and you magically get brought back to life and the game begins.

Being the first person to ever be reborn in the world of Amalur has its perks. For one you are fate-less. Every other denizen of Amalur has a predetermined fate that can never be broken, until you come along that is. Not only are you allowed to change your own fate, but you can change others’ as well.

It’s certainly one of the most interesting ideas in Amalur that makes it stand out in a world of “work from nothing to a hero” RPG’s that show up. Unfortunately, this possibility of truly shaping the world you live in is never expanded to its full potential.

Conversations with NPCs in Amalur are split between using a circle with multiple choices akin to Mass Effect and a list with different options to “say.” The circle is somewhat satisfying as your choices of what to say change how the NPC’s react to you, but the same can not be said about the listed options. Your character never speaks which makes conversing feel completely one sided. Most of the time I felt like I was just checking off a list of talking points.

The other main aspect of Amalur is questing and battling. Quests are split into Main, Side, or Faction. The main quests do a splendid job of advancing a decent story, but with a massive amount of people needing your help for one thing or another, the quests piled up and I often forgot who I talked to about what and where I was going.

Fortunately for Amalur, the freedom of choice is visibly apparent. If you don’t want to talk to NPCs, walk right past them. If side missions aren’t your thing, skip them. I found most of the missions enjoyable and varied, however. I probably took as many quests as I could because the combat is ridiculously fun.

Amalur allows you to destroy monsters as either a warrior, who specializes in melee weapons, a mage, who partakes in using magic to dispose of enemies, or a rogue, who uses bows, arrows, and daggers. Combat is incredibly fun and feels more like God of War than the usual “hack at an enemy until its dead” strategy other games use.

Combat is undoubtedly Amalur’s strong point. Diving around an area and attacking monsters at every slim opening you get while multiple enemies barrage you with attacks is exhilarating. The options to fight any way you like makes the game very approachable. The game gives you the freedom to find the way that you like to play most.

Amalur is ambitious but it feels like the developers put too much on their plate at once. The combat alone is almost worth the price of admission, and the game is very, very deep. If you can look past some of the flaws, you’ll find a game that was obviously created with the gamer in mind and is a quality RPG through and through.